Thursday, September 29, 2016

Compared to a lot of
movie reviewers, I think I spend relatively little time writing about actors.
For sure, there are exceptions – you can’t review About Schmidt without writing at length about Jack Nicholson. But I
used up my word quota on Spider
without saying a word about Ralph Fiennes, and I don’t think many reviewers did
that. So today, to remedy the balance a bit, let’s just chew the fat about two
of the greats.

When I was getting
excited about movies in the early 80s, two actors seemed preeminent: Al Pacino
and Robert De Niro. Both were still in their first decade of stardom; they were
smoldering and reclusive and unknowable and they made movies sparingly, so that
fans suffered a long frustrating wait between projects. They were clearly
mature actors who made hard-edged adult projects – if you were under 18, you
were probably sneaking into the theaters.

Ups and downs

De Niro worked
mainly with Martin Scorsese and was already legendary for his preparation –
particularly how he gorged himself to play the fat Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull. He was regarded as an
insolent chameleon, although people tended to overlook how he was already
relying on certain mannerisms. Pacino seemed somehow more wounded and less
molded – his characters were usually essentially tragic, and with the failed Bobby Deerfield he’d shown a rather
bleak romantic streak. Whereas De Niro’s absences from the screen seemed
attributable to deliberation, Pacino’s were rooted more in a kind of
desperation.

Thirty-year careers
obviously have their ups and downs, and when I was first focusing in, both
stars’ status seemed in some danger of eroding. Pacino seemed unsure of his
direction – Author Author, Scarface,
Revolution – and then entered a four year silence. De Niro’s films were
usually commercial failures despite their critical standing, and with his
cameos in Angel Heart and The Untouchables he seemed to be
slipping into smaller roles.

In 1998 De Niro made
Midnight Run, at the time a
remarkably straightforward film for him. I thought he was amazing in it – every
gesture, every expression was perfectly calibrated, creating a complex
character who was also utterly stylized. I went four times at least, and
watched it subsequently as many times on video (when you’re young, you tend to
overreact to certain things). I saw the movie again last year and I still think
it’s a kind of masterpiece – a film with a unique worldview both whimsically
abstract and wearily abrasive. And De Niro is
amazing in it.

De Niro then started
to make movies at an unprecedented pace, including numerous projects (Stanley and Iris, Jacknife, We’re no Angels)
that surely wouldn’t have made the cut for him a few years earlier. Meanwhile,
Pacino returned with Sea of Love. I
still remember how excited I was about that. The movie was pretty
straightforward material, but Pacino was completely magnetic in it –
transforming entire scenes with his inventive, laconic charisma. Apparently reenergized,
he quickly followed up with another Godfather
film, a goofy cameo in Dick Tracy
and, within a few years, an Oscar for Scent
of a Woman (De Niro already had two, for The Godfather Part Two and Raging
Bull).

The mellow years

Some time after
that, I failed to hang on their careers with the same zeal. They both started
to make the odd film I considered missable. Including projects yet to be
released, the Internet Movie Database lists 12 films for De Niro from 2000
onwards, and 7 for Pacino. That’s the kind of pace associated with work horses
rather than Method geniuses. With his hit comedies Analyze This and Meet the
Parents, De Niro scored his greatest commercial successes ever. And people
started to discern a pattern in Pacino’s career where he played the charismatic
mentor to younger men in indifferent films – Johnny Depp in Donnie Brasco, Colin Farrell in The Recruit, Keanu Reeves in The Devil’s Advocate.

They’ve both become
more accessible in other ways too – turning up on award shows, or on Letterman,
or in De Niro’s case even hosting Saturday
Night Live (and apparently not having much fun). In Pacino’s case this
accessibility seems like evidence of someone who’s finally comfortable in his
own skin; who’s found a way to feel true to himself without drowning in angst.
Even when his movies aren’t the strongest, it’s easy to see what drew him to
them. The Recruit, for instance, is a
run of the mill thriller, but his performance in it is amazingly inventive. He
was just as great in S1m0ne, and even
better in People I Know. In the
meantime, he’s stepped up his stage activity – doing Bertold Brecht in Brooklyn
last year and this year on Broadway in Oscar Wilde’s Salome.

But De Niro’s career
has become inexplicable. My impetus to write this article came after I caught
up with Showtime, the movie he made
last year with Eddie Murphy. The movie isn’t so much bad as utterly valueless.
It gives De Niro nothing to do that could possibly interest a great actor, and
he merely seems to be drifting. His presence there is inexplicable. His recent
movies like City by the Sea, The Score,
15 Minutes, Ronin – some of them are better than others, but none are
worthy of the actor he was in the 70’s. But it’s not the material that’s so
depressing – it’s De Niro’s increasing capitulation to it. I’ve sometimes
wondered if this isn’t what appeals to him – to become as self-effacing as
possible. Except that in other movies, such as The Adventure of Rocky and Bullwinkle, he seems involved solely
because of a bizarre desire for self-parody.

Heat

In all the above, I’ve
conspicuously failed to mention Heat,
Michael Mann’s 1995 film in which the two, for the first and so far only time,
shared the screen (they were both in The
Godfather Part Two, but never in the same scene). I think the movie was
more than I could absorb on a first viewing, but it’s since become one of my
favourites of the 90’s. Pacino as the cop has some of the most flamboyant
moments of his career, sometimes going clearly over the top, but to the end of
painting a man so immersed in darkness that his only option is to define his
own psychological and behavioral territory. De Niro, as the villain, plays a
man who hardly lets anything slip – buttoned down and all business, although
with an emotional streak that costs him his life in the end. The famous coffee
shop scene, where the two acknowledge their places on opposite sides of the
law, and the inevitability of a confrontation to come, is fascinating, but
oddly restrained, as though they both feared where it might lead them to let
loose.

It's hard to write
at length about one without bringing up the other, and their careers seem very
much like two sides of the same coin. At the moment I think Pacino has the
clear upper hand, but that could easily swing the other way again. Actually I
hope it does. Surely these two amazing icons aren’t through with surprising us
yet.

Monday, September 26, 2016

Dirty Pretty Things ought to be a slam-dunk – great concept
matched with great execution. It’s directed by Stephen Frears, the British
veteran who seems to be gaining increasing currency as one of the great
directors – for instance, he was the subject of a special tribute at the film
festival a couple of years ago. The lack of a recognizable visual style used to
be a potential kiss of death under the auteur theory, but for Frears it’s
generally cited as a strength – he’s engaged, committed, meticulous and funny,
but ultimately allows the material to breathe in a way that, say, Oliver Stone
doesn’t. I don’t know why Stone came to mind there, except that for a while he
was at the top of the heap with two directing Oscars and another nomination
within five years, the subject of huge scrutiny and debate, until he all but
wore out his welcome. In a classic tortoise-hare reversal, it now seems clear
that his place in the history book shrinks while that of others grows.

Dirty Pretty Things

Frears’ pragmatism
has sometimes seen him smothered by unsuitable material (particularly Dustin
Hoffman’s Hero), but one has to admit
that My Beautiful Laundrette, The Hit,
The Grifters, High Fidelity and Dangerous
Liaisons form quite a resume. Except for The Grifters, and unlike a number of Stone’s movies, I haven’t seen
any of them more than once – I guess I just like the auteurist excesses. But
I’m sure Frears steered those works as close to maximum pay-off as anyone could
have done. I don’t think that’s quite the case with the new film though.

It’s about
immigrants in modern-day London – and it’s not about anyone else: there are no
major white characters here. Chiwetel Ejiofor plays a Nigerian doctor who fled
from his country to avoid a trumped-up murder charge and now drives a cab by
day. At night he works at a faded-grandeur hotel where the manager (Sergi
Lopez) trades in human organs on the side: a fake passport in return for a
kidney. It’s a horrifying premise, rendered all the more so through Frears’
unforced, matter-of-fact presentation. The movie’s early stages unfold this
plot while painting a panoply of intriguing, marginal characters in a world
where everything is a compromise: jobs, sexual pride, ownership over one’s
body, love.

The film benefits
immensely from Ejiofor’s sympathetic charisma, which compensates for Lopez’
rather by-the-numbers villain and Audrey Tautou’s rather pinched damsel in
distress (her Amelie appeal isn’t
particularly evident here). But in the end, the movie takes on the shape of a
familiar thriller, grappling with the situation by a melodramatic reversal and,
ultimately, by allowing its main characters to escape from it. That’s not
unsatisfying as plotting, but you suspect the film could have accommodated a
more penetrating analysis of what it depicts. Still, it’s refreshingly
unsentimental, and it looks great, with a slightly tawdry look to the visuals,
ably symbolizing the faded promise of the Britain that’s on display here.

Capturing the Friedmans

The story behind Capturing the Friedmans is stranger than
most fictions. Andrew Jarecki made his fortune as the founder of moviefone.com,
and then decided to become a filmmaker. He started making a documentary about
New York City clowns, which brought him to David Friedman, one of the top
children’s party entertainers. He stumbled in turn onto Friedman’s tortured
personal history – fifteen years earlier, both his father and his younger
brother had been imprisoned on multiple charges of child sex abuse. The father
killed himself in jail after two years; the brother, who was only nineteen when
he went into prison, served thirteen years. And it turned out that Friedman had
videotaped many of the family’s conversations during this period, and was
willing to make them available to Jarecki. Thus the project evolved into something
more ambitious and darker than clowns could ever have yielded.

In part, Jarecki’s
film is a relatively straightforward effort to understand what happened,
constructed through interviews with detectives, lawyers, alleged victims,
family members and others. Without ever seeming like an overt exercise in
rehabilitation, the film casts severe questions on the adequacy of the police
investigation and the credibility of the witnesses (the incident now seems like
one of the notorious “false memory” cases). I think most viewers will conclude
that the two men were certainly innocent of the bulk of the charges, but that
there might have been something to the “no smoke without fire” view expressed
in the movie.

This applies
particularly to the father, who admitted to pedophilic incidents while denying
the specific allegations. Based on his wife’s testimony, he sounds like a
reluctant heterosexual who might have fared better in less strictly defined
times – not that the movie traffics in overt sympathy. In one of Jarecki’s few
striking misjudgments, the film only tells us at the very end that his 65-year
old brother, who testifies to camera throughout the film, is a homosexual in a
stable relationship. The timing suggests we should read this as a meaningful
revelation (presumably as a window into the road that the father should have
followed), but it struck me as manipulative.

Sadder than fiction

The film is
generally far subtler than that though, and it’s overwhelmingly sad and
disturbing. The home video footage, inevitably, is particularly painful and
fascinating, as the family members strategize and accuse and yell at each
other. The sons gang up not against the accused father but rather against their
mother, who they regard as under-supportive (and more generally as a nagging
woman who doesn’t share their intelligence or sense of humour) – this is
another sense in which the film somehow seems almost to be about maleness. Even
on the eve of imprisonment, anger and frustration coexist with goofy humour and
occasional camaraderie, confirming human resilience but also showing how little
they understood what was really happening to them. And of course, it’s
impossible to know how much the fact of being filmed affected the family’s behavior.
Some of the scenes, if they were being acted, would seem clumsy and not very
well written. Maybe that’s life for you.

Of course, Jarecki
was incredibly lucky to stumble on this material, and to some extent you might find
yourself admiring his work more as assemblage and research than as art. That’s
not fair though, for Capturing the
Friedmans is extremely subtle and ambiguous. And it’s one film in which you
categorically feel relief for the happy ending (or as happy an ending as the
circumstances make possible), in which the brother is finally released and
reunited with his now remarried mother. Although in a way you’d like to know
what they do next, it’s better that the movie ends, before things turn dark again.

Thursday, September 22, 2016

According to the Toronto Star, only 2% of critics gave Gigli a positive review. So I should sew
up my contrarian credentials for years ahead here, because I liked the movie.
For sure, it isn’t an overall success, and there’s a pervasive sense of unease
about it. But it has a crazy, endearing ambition. And a willfully perverse
streak that I think deserves modest affection.

Martin Brest

As the world now
knows, this is the movie that brought Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez together,
playing two would-be assassins paired on a job, going from bickering to falling
in love – even though she claims to be a lesbian! The world only knows this, of
course, from the publicity overdrive; no one’s actually seen the film. It was a
huge flop – I went on the fourth day of release, and there were seven other
people in the theater. So much for the public’s supposed fascination with
Affleck and Lopez.

More interesting to
me was the film’s director Martin Brest. Brest’s last five films, in order, are
Beverly Hills Cop, Midnight Run, Scent of
a Woman, Meet Joe Black and Gigli
– a striking journey from king of the mainstream to commercial wilderness. Scent of a Woman won the Oscar for Pacino,
but Brest’s clear artistic peak came with Midnight
Run. It’s clearly a chase picture, but possessing an almost spooky
composure and unity of vision. The De Niro-Charles Grodin partnership in that
movie is one of my all time favourites – a fascinating duel in competing
styles, that’s ultimately remarkably complex and even moving.

Gigli, which is the first film Brest wrote for himself since his debut Going in Style, seems like an attempt to
recreate the ambiance of Midnight Run
in a different genre. It’s a romantic comedy, blended with a fractured
meditation on the nature of sexual attraction. Affleck plays Gigli, a not
particularly proficient tough guy who’s hiding a mentally challenged kidnap
victim. Not trusting him to do the job, his boss puts another professional on
the case – enter Lopez. The majority of the film takes place in Affleck’s drab
apartment, which occasionally gives the movie the look of a cheaply shot stage
adaptation. A stream of one-scene cameos increases the theatricality – Christopher
Walken as a cop investigating the disappearance, Lainie Kazan as Affleck’s
mother, Missy Crider as Lopez’ distraught lesbian lover, Pacino as a crime
lord.

Gobble Gobble

The title, which
again is the surname of Affleck’s character, serves as a metaphor for the film
– it looks as though it should evoke Leslie Caron, is apparently meant to rhyme
with “really,” but generally gets mispronounced as the more earthy-sounding
“jiggly.” Which is one of the more minor examples of how Gigli meshes a romantic sensibility with a gratuitous coarseness.
By coarseness I don’t just mean familiar swearwords, but such barnyard oddities
as Affleck telling her early on that “I’m the bull, you’re the cow,” and Lopez
initiating sex with the matchless line: “It’s turkey time…gobble gobble.”
There’s a quality to this that seems to go beyond mere tastelessness, as though
the movie were grasping at something elemental. At the same time, of course, it
casts two beautiful people in the roles – and Lopez in particular is made to look
as lovely as I’ve ever seen her. The conflict between these two strands is at
the heart of the film’s “badness,” but I think it’s rather interesting if you
think about it as an aesthetic construct.

As the relationship
heats up, Affleck and Lopez have long monologues about the glories of the male
and female genitalia respectively. Again, there’s something wantonly naïve
about this, as though such subjects had never been discussed by anyone before.
Lopez’ apparent lesbianism (which many viewers would probably read as a lie to
keep Affleck at bay, until Crider suddenly turns up) is another source of
fundamental sexual confusion. The relative claustrophobia of the apartment
setting and the absence of a sense of the outside world (the cameos by Walken
et al suggest it’s merely insane out there) occasionally cause the movie to
resemble a weird behavioral laboratory.

Gigli’s most problematic element is the mentally challenged Brian, who
communicates a considerable amount of sexual frustration (mainly expressed
through an identification with Baywatch)
while suffering through much abrasiveness and name-calling. I think Brest was
trying to do the kind of thing the Farrelly brothers do with disabled actors –
ennoble them by refusing to spare them. In Gigli
it seems one-sided and plainly mean-spirited. And yet, the character is yet another
strand in the sexually neurotic web I mentioned, like a painful embodiment of
something from the other characters’ subconscious.

The ending, where
Brian finds his version of Baywatch
and (not really giving anything away here) Affleck and Lopez take off together is
only partly a conventional wrap-up – even by the standards of romantic
comedies, the permanence of the happy ending is highly in doubt. To me this
confirms the extreme uncertainty and sense of conditionality that pervades the
movie. So am I on to something here that others have missed, or is the above a
colossal exercise in pseudo-intellectualism? Probably somewhere in between.
Maybe I’m trying too hard to see merit in the film, but it’s hard to feel too
guilty about that, given how others clambered over themselves to heap scorn on
it.

Masked and Anonymous

Perhaps the
second-most reviled movie of the year is Masked
and Anonymous, a vastly confused, rambling odyssey which I take to be an
attempt to find a fictional expression for Bob Dylan’s by now vastly allusive,
complex persona. The movie (apparently co-written by Dylan under a pseudonym)
is certainly a vanity project, a full cataloguing of which would probably
demand intimate familiarity with the Dylan oeuvre – not something I can claim
(although I’m enough of a fan to own Slow
Train Coming, and even to listen to it once in a while).

Nevertheless, if I
hadn’t used up all the space on Gigli,
I could go on at some length about how the people in the movie (played by an
all-star cast including Jeff Bridges – much more interesting here than in Seabiscuit – John Goodman, Penelope
Cruz, Ed Harris (in blackface!), Jessica Lange, Mickey Rourke and the great
Bruce Dern) represent this and that and how the basic premise and structure
connote that or the other. Maybe it’d all be worth crap, I don’t know. But in
summary, the film seems to me pretty close to what a Bob Dylan movie would have
to be at this point, which is obviously vastly different from what that would
have meant in say 1965. That’s probably all the information you need on that
one. I will say though that Masked and
Anonymous, for all its points of interest, is no Gigli.

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Seabiscuit belongs in a familiar category in American film – a nice little story,
grotesquely padded-out with sentiment and would-be significance. As everyone
knows by now, Seabiscuit was the 1930’s Depression-era little-horse-that-could;
a written-off nag notable only for his prowess at sleeping and eating who
somehow developed into a consistent winner, ultimately conquering the mighty
War Admiral in a one-on-one encounter. I haven’t read Laura Hillenbrand’s
bestseller, on which the film is based, but the movie explicitly regards
Seabiscuit as the perfect symbol for his time – a creature written off and
tossed on the scrap heap, who got his second chance and made the most of it.

About a horse

The new film,
directed by Gary Ross (who directed Pleasantville
and directed Dave and Big), is very well-made: handsomely
photographed, lovingly designed, well cast, and making the most of the story’s
lump-in-the-throat aspects. It stars Tobey Maguire as the horse’s unlikely
jockey (too tall, volatile, blind in one eye), Jeff Bridges as the unlikely
owner (a car magnate with his eye on the future, who thought horses belonged to
the past) and Chris Cooper as the unlikely trainer (an eccentric who Bridges
finds living in the bush): all three of them bruised by past tragedies and
disappointments. Seabiscuit provides all of them (representing the country
beyond) an opportunity for renewal and redemption, and Ross takes great pains
to ensure that we don’t get tugged into the horse racing scenes as mere
spectacle, that we’re always aware of their wider resonance.

At which point it
seems necessary to confirm that, yes, it’s a movie about a horse. At one point
I wondered whether Ross has ever seen Robert Bresson’s Au hazard Balthazar, built around the suffering of a poor donkey.
By which I mean that there’s nothing inherently silly about an animal bearing
immense filmic meaning and weight. It’s obviously a fine line though, when the
most famous horse of the last century is probably Mr. Ed. Ross’ approach to
this is to minimize the horse’s presence in the film. Seabiscuit doesn’t appear
for the first 45 minutes, and he’s talked about in the film more than he’s
actually seen. At the start of the big race, the opening buzzer sounds, and
then rather than showing us whether Seabiscuit got away to the fast start
they’d been planning for (and on the preparation for which the film has spent
considerable time), Ross cuts to a montage of people around the country,
listening to the race. It’s a shocking negation of his movie’s dramatic
possibilities, as jarring an intrusion as something in a Godard movie.

Noble history

At this point, as
throughout the film, historian David McCullough provides some voice-over narration
on the historical context – at various points he tells us about Henry Ford, the
1929 crash, the depression, prohibition and so forth. It’s godawful stuff, like
filler from the CBS Sunday morning show, doses of medicine that we must all
presume to be good for us. As the film’s opening section flicks through the
back stories of the three protagonists, regularly returning to McCullough’s
ponderous asides, it feels like Ross hasn’t moved too far from his earlier
career as a political scriptwriter. It’s only in America, I think, that
ambitious mainstream films so often muse mistily on the country’s own past. The
nostalgia seems superficially rooted in pride and fortitude, but by its very
existence it seems to connote insecurity, a fear of a pending America that
doesn’t know or care about the country’s noble history and of where that might
lead.

You would have
thought that Ross’ decision to downplay the horse would mean we get to know the
human characters much better, but we don’t. It feels like the three protagonists,
and Bridges’ wife played by Elizabeth Banks, are together in scene after scene,
but they hardly talk about anything of substance. The movie shows them to us,
but doesn’t illuminate anything. Bridges’ presence is especially disappointing,
consisting almost entirely of a series of crumpled smiles on which the audience
can project just about anything it likes. Maybe there’s some kind of metaphor
for American history in there somewhere.

Seabiscuit is hardly a bad movie, but that’s because it’s only partly a movie,
and partly a multimedia cultural heritage project. I really question which is
the greater insult to the audience’s intelligence – the regular summer action
fodder, or this kind of golden-flow patriot fodder.

Other myths

If you’re going to
do the mythic thing, you may as well go all the way, and that leads you to
Michael Polish’s Northfork – another
specifically “American” creation set around a dying valley on the eve of being
flooded by a new dam. It follows a group of men in black charged with moving
inhabitants out of the valley, a priest caring for a sick child, and a group of
angels searching for a lost colleague. The movie is shot in a desaturated
colour verging on black and white; it’s brooding and allusive, sometimes
starkly funny, and never straightforward. Except for isolated moments, I doubt
the film will have much lasting stature – it follows too specific and esoteric
a formula. And I doubt whether the Polish brothers (Michael’s twin brother Mark
co-wrote and stars in the film) yet have the rigour of important artists. But
it’s a unique movie, and mostly in a good way.

Another kind of
myth-making is on view in Alex Proyas’ Garage
Days. After The Crow and Dark City, the Australian Proyas applies
his technical facility (no less impressive for being more or less
indistinguishable from that of Guy Ritchie or the new breed of Mexican directors
or just about any other movie director under 40) to a simple story of a rock
band trying to make good. The trailer and poster give away what would otherwise
have seemed to be the movie’s major twist: they eventually get their big break,
but they suck. The movie enjoys sketching out their sundry misadventures,
although it’s all extremely (almost defiantly) basic kind of stuff, with barely
a cliché left outside the garage. And much as Seabiscuit almost forgets about the horse, Garage Days definitely forgets about the music, rendering their
great passion strangely abstract.

Proyas can’t make a
great movie out of it, but he makes it seem like more than a purely local
story. He wields the tools of cinema so dashingly that the movie almost takes
on a cosmic scope. There’s a word for this of course – pretentious. But at
least he’s not lecturing us about anything.

About Me

From 1997 to 2014 I wrote a weekly movie column for Toronto's Outreach Connection newspaper. The paper has now been discontinued and I've stopped writing new articles, but I continue to post my old ones here over time. I also aim to post a daily movie review on Twitter (torontomovieguy) and I occasionally tweet on other matters (philosopherjack).